Law against ecocide would enable governments to take action backed by legislation instead of nice words: Polly Higgins

Polly Higgins is an international environmental attorney, award-winning author, and a long time advocate for the earth’s rights. Higgins and I met in 2009 on the United Nations Climate Express train on our way to Copenhagen for COP15. At the time, she was campaigning for a Declaration of Planetary Rights announced by the Bolivian delegation at the Conference of the Parties and I was shooting a documentary. At the conference, the idea of setting legal boundaries to halt ecocide, or the destruction of the planet, began to percolate. The next year, in March 2010, Higgins proposed to the United Nations that ecocide be declared the Fifth “Crime Against Peace.” Drawing… more